Respect to anyone still managing a library of mp3s

No algorithmic suggestions and therefore, no curated daily taste playlists, no sorting your library by genre (at least not as granular and specific as Spotify unless you put in as much work as they do at tagging your music), finding new music manually takes at least 10x more effort and you’re limited to the taste you already know you have

I haven't used Spotify much, but I found Google Music and Pandora to be very shallow with regards to discovery. There's not really much to them other than "people who liked X tend to like Y" or "here's something that sounds similar to an artist you like". It's discovery sure, but it's discovery on autopilot. It'll keep you treading water in the same shallow area of the ocean forever unless you make a concerted effort outside of its algorithms to listen to something new.

I usually don't want something "similar to...X" when finding new music. I usually want things that are completely different. I subscribed to Google Music for around a year and found maybe two new artists I liked to listen to. I switched back to a manual discovery process around five years ago and this year alone I've found probably a dozen.

All valid points, and I'm glad Spotify works for you. For me though, the tedium isn't nearly as bad as it seems to be for you. I'm fine with my methods since they've never truly failed me Even with my relatively disorganized collection, I can find what I'm looking for pretty quickly even without metadata (Lots of my oldest stuff is also from Limewire, and even Kazaa. Let's just not mention the bitrate of some of it lol).

I'm fine with gradually expanding my tastes too, so I don't need Spotify for finding new things. To be fair though, I have found some truly great stuff through the site that I feel I would have never heard, so it's not without its merits. Though if you're ever bored and you want to do some manual discovery, Every Noise at Once is a bizarrely cool place and might lead to some interesting finds. But YMMV. And if I don't feel like picking anything I'll just throw on whatever internet radio station suits my fancy.

I get you on the storage space as well. Luckily for me, a lot of what I listen to (don't make fun please) is chiptunes, and I found a kickass app for my phone that reads the same files that the real consoles read so I can enjoy them in truly perfect quality, plus I have actual weeks of music in this format for less than 300 megs.

I admit my tastes are highly eclectic - to say the least - but I'm perfectly content with that. It's great that you, along with the majority of other people, have an option that best suits your needs. May we both be able to access our music solutions as long as possible.

Being able to pick songs

Christ

Plenty of things have been removed from Spotify or just bastardized over the years.

The app is so much less useful overall, so many controls are just gone. It's exhibit A for the dumbing down of modern apps. It went from being mature software designed to give users tools to control their experiences to a ranch designed solely to corral users into singular usage patterns.

Interesting. Not a Spotify user, but that’s pretty gross. Looks like the way things are going and I’m becoming more okay with that. There are more and more commodities I’m becoming more and more comfortable not paying for.